The Death of the Most Civilized Ship
She was perhaps the most beautiful ocean liner ever built. Her three funnels (the aftmost a dummy) were raked and diminished in size from fore to aft. This gave her the sleek, powerful, forward-driving look that was the essence of the art deco style that so inspired her interior design. And in her time she was both the largest and the fastest ship afloat, the only French liner to hold the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing. But less than seven years after her maiden voyage, the Normandie suffered a horrible death at her berth on Manhattan’s West Side, 65 years ago today.
Built at St. Nazaire, where the Loire River reaches the Atlantic, she was launched in 1932, the wife of the President of the Third French Republic breaking one of the world’s largest bottles of champagne across her bow at the ceremony. At 1,030 feet, she was the first ocean liner to exceed 1,000 feet in length. With a beam of 118 feet, she was too wide for the Panama Canal. Her four screws, powered by turbo-electric engines, drove her at over 30 knots.
Though she was the largest ship afloat, she did not carry the most passengers, taking only 848 first-class, 670 tourist, and 454 third-class. But this gave the passengers more room, and the luxury and beauty of the Normandie’s appointments soon became legendary.
Her unobstructed sun deck ran the length of two city blocks. Her first-class dining room was three decks high and more than 300 feet long, with walls of molded glass and lighting fixtures by the great French artist Lalique, some over 15 feet tall. She had a theater with 400 seats, a swimming pool close to 80 feet long, an exquisite chapel. Each of her 431 first-class cabins was uniquely decorated.
After her launch the Great Depression delayed her fitting out, and her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York didn’t take place until May 29, 1935. The Normandie took the Blue Riband from the Italian Line’s Rex on that voyage, but she suffered from vibration. This was fixed at her winter refit in 1935–36, when her poorly designed three-bladed screws were replaced with four-bladed ones.
When the Queen Mary entered service the following year, she quickly took the Blue Riband, but the Normandie won it back in 1937 before losing it for good to the Queen Mary later that year. She ceased to be the world’s largest passenger ship when the Queen Elizabeth first sailed the Atlantic, in March 1940.
By that time, of course, Europe was at war. The Queen Elizabeth’s voyage, in fact, was accomplished in secrecy to avoid German U-boats. She was painted a dull gray and was soon outfitted as a troop ship.
And by that time as well, the Normandie’s career was already over.
Due to sail from New York on August 29, 1939, the Normandie was detained by U.S. authorities, and she was laid up at her berth at Pier 88, at 48th Street, when war broke out a few days later. There she stayed for more than two years. On December 12, 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor and a day after Hitler declared war on the United States, the U.S. Maritime Commission seized the Normandie and handed her over to the United States Navy. She was renamed the U.S.S. Lafayette, and it was announced that she would be transformed into a troopship.
She was stripped of her luxurious appointments (which is why so many of them survive, many now in museums) and work began almost immediately. But on February 9, 1942, a fire broke out at around 2:30 in the afternoon. “I was working on a chain gang,” an 18-year-old navy ironworker named Charles Collins remembered. “We had chains around some pillars and eased them down when they were cut through. Two men were operating an acetylene torch. About 30 or 40 men were working in the room, and there were bales and bales of mattresses. A spark hit one of the bales, and the fire began. We yelled for the fire watch, and Leroy Rose, who was in our chain, and I tried to beat out the fire with our hands. . . . The smoke and heat were terrific.”
Although the Normandie had a state-of-the-art firefighting system, it had been disconnected for the conversion. New York City fire trucks and fireboats rushed to the scene of what was soon a five-alarm blaze and began pouring thousands of gallons of water into the ship, now belching out smoke through every opening, along with tongues of flame. The smoke drifted over Midtown Manhattan on a gentle westerly breeze. By 8 p.m. it was thought, incorrectly, that the fire was out and that the damage, while extensive, was relatively superficial. One man, a civilian, had died, and 128 had been injured.
Unfortunately, the ship’s watertight decks and bulkheads prevented much of the water from running down to her lowest parts. As thousands of tons of water accumulated on her upper decks, she listed 16 degrees to port, and tugs were brought in to nudge her back to the vertical. But as the flood tide came in, the ship, which had been resting on the bottom because of all the water aboard, refloated and became unstable. She was evacuated and the tugs quickly withdrawn. At 2:45 a.m. she capsized to port.
For a year and a half, the great ship lay on her side as tourists by the thousands drove down the West Side highway to catch a glimpse of her. Stripped of much of her topside fixtures, including her funnels, and pumped out, she was righted in August 1943. While rumors were constantly heard that she would be converted into an aircraft carrier, it was decided that she was too badly damaged to be worth salvaging for any purpose. After the war she was sold for scrap for a mere $161,000.
It was a sad end for what had been, for one brief, shining moment in the late 1930s, the greatest ocean liner in the world and one of its most loved. As The New York Times explained in an editorial the day after the fire, “The Normandie was one of the proudest gestures the Third French Republic ever made. She was built in strength, in luxury and in loveliness. She was built for peace and for pleasure, for profit and for glory. She had the best of French engineering and the most delicate of French decoration. She was a civilized ship.”